Thanks for all the replies and kind words already! I wasn't sure anyone would care about a grotty old broken MINI!!!

I'm having a lot of issues with Photobucket and getting the images not to duplicate themselves all over the place, so i'm doing fairly small updates one by one so not to push my luck!

I'm pleased to report that the journey back was really easy - all I had to do was make sure I stayed roughly behind my Dad's car. The fixed line only had a little bit of 'slack' in the towing eye fixtures, so it didn't jerk back and forth like a rope does. It does feel quite unnatural following a car at a distance of 2 metres (although, being an ex-BMW driver you'd think i would be used to that )

Once home, we pushed it up the drive and into the garage (having first displaced my Mum's MINI ... that didn't go down particularly well). It was about 9PM by the time it was home, so I closed the garage and called it a day.

So, you bought a car that doesn't work?

As I previously mentioned, I'm not in permanent employment at the minute (although i'm doing my best to change that!) so what money I do earn, needs to be saved and not spent on a money pit currently sitting in the garage!

I'm in two minds as to what to do, I either:

Strip it down myself - This has a few pitfalls - Firstly, I have never done this before - although I am mechanically minded and do a fair bit of work on my cars. And secondly, once I have stripped the engine down, I am concerned that I won't know what i'm looking at not be able to determine how bad the damage is.

Get my friendly mechanic to take a look - He should be able to do this quite cheaply for me, and will have a better idea of what needs repairing/replacing. Although I don't really have the funds to actually fix it yet.

As far as I am aware the head will need to be skimmed and tested for cracks, gasket changed and reassemble. I'm lead to believe that the coolant got low, it overheated and the head gasket went. So i'll need to ascertain why it was losing coolant (or if the HG was already leaking which caused the coolant to drop).

I want to keep the car regardless of what needs to be fixed, I just have to accept that the worse the damage, the longer it will take to save up the cash.

There will also be a degree of recommissioning work to get it through an MOT and safe to drive. The brake discs have been an advisory on the MOT for a couple of years, so I would like to change all discs and pads for peace of mind. Only one of the wipers seems to have a blade, and the centre brake light doesn't work.

The harsh light of day

My first priority was to get the car to a respectable standard, as there was a great chance of the bin man taking it by mistake. I was also getting a bit tired of getting my hand covered in bird guano every time I wanted to open the door.
Here are some pictures of the car the next morning. It was mainly covered in detritus from the surrounding trees, a fair bit of bird droppings down the driver's side and quite a lot of sap - just for good measure.

One of only a couple of bodywork issues - hole in the rear bumper

Bubbling on the tailgate above the reg plate lights

The interior is surprisingly good. The seats are in pretty good shape with no tears or cracks, just a bit of wear. The seat bases are, as with any early MINI with full leather - a bit baggy. They seem to get like that after about 30,000 miles - seriously, have a look on eBay!
The carpets were largely quite clean - although the mats had a little bit of staining on. Despite the mold issue, there was no real smell in the car.

Apologies, my skills with the DSLR are lacking - focus isn't great on a few of these pictures!

Working on part 3 at the moment. The initial clean up!

Thanks for looking

Last edited by jbenekeorr; 13-07-2017 at 08:22 PM.

The Following 15 Users Say Thank You to jbenekeorr For This Useful Post: